“Just so, then, it is here; we are all one family, and there is nothing mean in reporting to me, more than to a mother. It’s the motive that prompts the telling that gives it its moral character. It is the noblest that can act wisely, and escape the odium of tell-tales; and, my dear Marion, I feel quite sure that for the future I can trust you.”
Marion went away with a light heart. “Trust me? of course she can,” she said to herself; “but I am so sorry for Carrie Smyth.”
Carrie, in truth, even after listening to the terrible denunciations Miss Palmer had read to her, was to be pitied for her moral as well as mental dulness. She went through the ordeal of her talk with Miss Ashton with far less feeling than Marion had shown; and the only punishment she minded was being put back into the class of beginners, and being told that the next time she was found doing anything of the kind, and told a falsehood about it, she would be expelled from school.
This, on the whole, she would have liked, for study was detestable to her, and there was nothing but the 215 ambition of her mother that made it seem necessary in her home surroundings.
Both Miss Palmer and Marion were delighted to have her leave the class. Marion kindly kept the reason for her having done so to herself, though many inquiries were made of her by the other scholars.
CHAPTER XXXI.
MARION’S LETTER FROM HOME.
Soon after the first of January, Marion received the following letter from her mother:—